I don't know what those four state's goals are, but if they are out to address the nominal issue and not just collect a payday in court from deep pockets, they are correct to not sue all of them all at once. In our system, they want a precedent. To get that precedent, they go after their best target to get it. I would expect they looked at all the possible targets and determined that Facebook is the one they are most likely to win.
They have to make this determination before discovery, but that's life.
If they win this case, even if they don't get the full penalty, you can be sure the other companies will be paying attention and will do something about it. Of course that "something" may not be "immediately stop engineering addiction into their products" and be more like "be sure to obfuscate it better, maybe crank the knob down a bit and prepare to claim in a future lawsuit that the problem was solved even though they haven't really changed anything". Suing the next company is easier with a precedent to go off of.
They are correct to concentrate their fire on what they believe is the most vulnerable part of the line, not to spread their limited resources out over attacking half-a-dozen of the largest and most well-resourced targets on Earth. Once they lose the first case, the resulting precedent weakens them in all of the others as well.
They're all doing it, and they all need consequences for it.
Per the article:
> Meta is one of several social media companies facing mounting legal pressure. Snap, Alphabet-owned YouTube and ByteDance-owned TikTok are also battling thousands of lawsuits alleging they intentionally designed their platforms to keep children and teenagers hooked, contributing to widespread mental health problems.
> The 15-year-old boy, identified in court filings by his initials, R.K.C., accuses Meta (the parent of Instagram), YouTube, TikTok and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay.
What traditional media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged? The local broadcast news makes you watch for half an hour to an hour, with a quarter of the time being ads, plus more sponsored segments, constantly teasing the headline news subject, which could have been a 100-word article. They take half a page of printed news and draw it out as long as they can, trying to bait you the whole time. YouTube channels' clickbait titles and thumbnails have nothing on them.
Trying to keep people engaged on your 30 minute long news segment is a lot different than trying to keep them engaged every free waking moment they have
News is famously 24 hours, and will always tell you to tune in at 8/9/10 PM to find out why the country is in a shambles/your home is under attack/the aliens are coming to abduct you.
As far as I know neither Tiktok or YT have contributed to a genocide[0] or sold their user's data for political propaganda purposes[1], so at least there's that
They have to make this determination before discovery, but that's life.
If they win this case, even if they don't get the full penalty, you can be sure the other companies will be paying attention and will do something about it. Of course that "something" may not be "immediately stop engineering addiction into their products" and be more like "be sure to obfuscate it better, maybe crank the knob down a bit and prepare to claim in a future lawsuit that the problem was solved even though they haven't really changed anything". Suing the next company is easier with a precedent to go off of.
They are correct to concentrate their fire on what they believe is the most vulnerable part of the line, not to spread their limited resources out over attacking half-a-dozen of the largest and most well-resourced targets on Earth. Once they lose the first case, the resulting precedent weakens them in all of the others as well.